


The Rise of the Marufuji-Tenjoin Empire of 4th Period Home Ec (or, How Marufuji Ryou Found Love)

by seondoks (orphan_account)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! GX
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-23
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-22 02:54:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/605016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/seondoks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fubuki and Ryou raise a flour sack in the spirit of home economics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Rise of the Marufuji-Tenjoin Empire of 4th Period Home Ec (or, How Marufuji Ryou Found Love)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



_monday_

It tastes a lot like karmic retribution when his teacher announces that everyone needs to partner up for a project. Ryou makes it a point to be punctual on most days, but even he can find himself in a situation requiring him to walk in after the bell sometimes. Apparently not without paying the price, however, seeing as he’s been pushed headfirst into a group activity.

Pulling out a pencil, he hopes with every fiber of his being that Fubuki will turn to him and ask if he wants to be partners, because Ryou remembers the sole incident where he had asked Fubuki but had ended up with Hamada instead. Hamada smelled like natto and pushed most of the work onto Ryou, which is also usually what ends up happening when he works with Fubuki, but Fubuki also doesn’t smell like natto. And if he really thinks about it, Fubuki kind of smells nice, like peppermint.

“Do you want to be my partner, Ryou?” Fubuki asks.

Ryou nods, saying nothing despite the relief that settles into him. When their teacher puts a flour sack onto their desk and wishes them good luck, Ryou doesn’t even have the good grace not to gape. He stares at the assignment handout given to them and wonders if it’s too late to switch into something more sensible, like art or music. 

_Raising Your Own Flour Baby_  
 _The goal of this project is to make clear the responsibilities that go into raising a baby and what that entails for each individual. Due to limited resources, every student will be partnered up with another. Be sure to write a journal log about your experience and analyze how this impacts your life as a student. Do your own work._

Fubuki looks entirely too pleased about this to be real and Ryou feels a lot like panicking. Even when the room starts to buzz with chatter, he says nothing to Fubuki.

“So...what should we name our baby?”

 _It’s a flour sack_ , Ryou doesn’t say. Instead he keeps looking down at the handout, face turning red. “Name it whatever.”

“How does Orihime sound? Yoshihiro?” The fact that Fubuki is genuinely concerned about the name of this flour sack makes Ryou want to bury his face in his hands. “Oh, I know!”

There’s a rustle of paper and when Ryou looks up, he sees that Fubuki is playing _MASH_.

“Say stop, Ryou.” He smiles at him like there isn’t something bizarrely wrong with this picture.

“You’re not serious...”

“Please?” And Fubuki makes that face, the one that makes him look a little like a wounded puppy and Ryou can feel his heart crumple.

“Stop,” he says, and watches Fubuki walk them through their game of MASH. Ryou tries to tell him that he’s playing wrong (“ _You counted seven instead of twelve--you were supposed to marry Takeshi Kaneshiro_ ”) but Fubuki pays him little mind, asking him instead if he wants twelve children.

“I--what? No.” He can never tell if Fubuki is being serious with him or not, and if he starts imagining having twelve children with Fubuki or starts imagining that Fubuki’s face falls a little, then it’s really all just in his head.

“No matter, we can always start with one, right?” He looks at Ryou earnestly and leans in a little across the desk.

Ryou doesn’t have the heart to say no, and by the time he thinks of a good retort, the bell has already rung.

***

_tuesday_

Despite what the assignment handout told him, there isn’t actually much maintenance that goes into raising a flour sack. And between the calculus and history homework, Ryou forgets to write anything in his log at all. It’s actually somewhat of a godsend that his brother reminds him to take the flour sack to school. Of course, he doesn’t tell this to Fubuki, who greets him in first period biology with a wave.

No one really knows how they manage to have the same schedule every year, but Ryou is convinced that it’s all a big joke played at his expense. He greets Fubuki and pushes the flour sack onto a corner of his desk, considering his task complete. It’s to his dismay, then, that the first words out of Fubuki’s mouth are: “You didn’t take care of Princess Hikari.”

Princess Hikari Marufuji-Tenjoin. After a long round of MASH, Fubuki had decided to crown their flour sack the first princess of the Marufuji-Tenjoin empire of 4th period Home Ec. He hasn’t called the flour sack anything else since then.

“I...was busy,” Ryou answers, pulling out last week’s assignment from his binder. Fubuki doesn’t turn around to face the front and Ryou silently prays that today is the day that their teachers realize that they have been facing the _back of Fubuki’s head_ all semester.

“Princess Hikari needs you to take care of her, Ryou.” Fubuki looks at the sack sadly. “You didn’t even give her a face.”

“That isn’t required for the assignment,” he says quietly, trying to pay attention to what’s being written on the blackboard. 

Ryou can guess what he’ll say next, and knowing that Fubuki is ridiculous does nothing to stop the vague sense of guilt building inside him. It’s probably why he agrees to have Fubuki come over to his house after school to “make sure he doesn’t neglect Princess Hikari.” He wants to tell Fubuki to get off when he starts making himself at home on his bed, but finds he has no good reason to do so.

“Are you hungry?” Ryou asks instead. 

He plans on sending Fubuki into the kitchen in search of snacks if he says yes. So of course it turns out to be that Fubuki has no interest in eating whatsoever, and is instead telling Ryou about the grand plans he has for Princess Hikari as he starts drawing her face in for class tomorrow. He occasionally turns around to face Fubuki and laughs in spite of himself when he proposes that they never allow Princess Hikari to marry.

Dinner rolls by all too quickly, and when Shou comes to the room to get them to eat, Fubuki sits up and marvels at the time. 

“It’s good to see you, Shou-kun,” he says. “I should go home, though, my sister is probably waiting for me.”

He picks up the flour sack--Princess Hikari--and turns to Ryou. “Princess Hikari wants a good night kiss!”

Ryou downright refuses to do something ridiculous like give a _flour sack_ a good night kiss, and he tells Fubuki so. It’s entirely the wrong thing to say, because the next moment he’s pressing the flour sack against his cheek and making obscene kissing noises. Ryou stares up at the ceiling and prays to every higher power that he knows for Shou to walk in at that moment. 

“Fubuki...” he mutters, and pushes Princess Hikari away from his face, glaring up at him. 

It does nothing to deter the smile on Fubuki’s face as he says, “You know, Princess Hikari isn’t the only one who wants a good night kiss.”

Ryou chokes and promptly drops the pencil in his hand. Neither of them move to pick it up. In fact, it feels like he can’t move at all, especially not with his breath catching hard in his throat. He’s about to do something foolish--like _kiss Fubuki_ when he hears his mother calling from downstairs.

“Ryou! Fubuki-kun! Dinner’s ready!”

Swallowing, he answers, “I’ll be down soon!”

Fubuki laughs a little, then, and pats his cheek. “You should give your kaa-san a good night kiss too, every once in a while.”

He doesn’t answer, watching Fubuki go downstairs with the flour sack in tow.

***

_wednesday_

Ryou can say with all honesty that he takes this project very seriously, no matter what sort of misgivings someone might have had about the sincerity of that statement. He didn’t lose Princess Hikari on purpose. It just happened to be his day to keep watch of her, and when it came time for lunch, he couldn’t very well stuff the sack into his locker. With a grimace, he went to the cafeteria, holding Princess Hikari in one arm and his lunch in the other.

When Asuka sat down next to him, he gave a short “hi” and stared at the interesting design that Fubuki made for what he assumed was Princess Hikari’s...face. He’d seen the artwork that Fubuki made in kindergarten, and he was certain that it wasn’t quite so bad.

“I see my brother got to the flour sack before you,” Asuka said.

“I thought Fubuki was better at drawing than that,” he replied, not looking away from the sack.

There was a decidedly rude snort from Asuka’s end. He thought he heard something along the lines of “sun shining out of his ass” under her breath. Ryou stared up at the ceiling and counted to ten before deciding how to respond.

He opened his mouth when Asuka beat him to the chase. “I’m just saying,” she explained with a shrug.

The following twenty minutes were spent staring at his history textbook with the hope that if he stared long enough, he would be able to distinguish between the old, dead white men in its pages in time for his quiz. What actually ended up happening was that he looked up and Princess Hikari was gone.

Immediately, he texted Asuka, asking if she took Princess Hikari. He received a short “No, last I saw, _Princess Hikari_ was right across from you.” Panic significantly rose with that text--for good reason, too, as his search led him to the tragic discovery that Princess Hikari was now sitting in the refrigerator, waiting to become tomorrow’s cafeteria cookies.

Ryou drags a hand down his face, wondering what exactly he did in a past life to deserve this. When he walks into Home Ec., he tells Fubuki that he left Princess Hikari with Asuka, and that he’ll take care of her for the next couple of days. He conveniently leaves out the part about Princess Hikari being turned into cookie dough, and gives a pained smile when Fubuki says, “I knew you were ready for twelve children, Ryou.”

***

At exactly 11:24 PM he texts Fubuki.

_Lost Princess Hikari._

He waits about fifteen seconds before sending another.

_Will explain later. Going over._

There’s a tree in the Tenjoins' yard that leads up to Fubuki’s window. Ryou has used it exactly three times in his life: the first when he ran away from home in fourth grade because he got a C on his report card, the second when he received a distressed call from Fubuki at two in the morning about his lost guinea pig, and the third time was the night before their middle school graduation. In retrospect, Ryou realizes the tree hasn’t really been used wisely. His parents weren’t mad about his report card, Nibbles ended up being in Asuka’s room, and graduating from middle school was a lot more of a joke than he had anticipated.

He thinks about that when he knocks on Fubuki’s window, finding the maneuver requiring considerably more balance than it did in eighth grade. Biting down on his lip, he waits for the window to open. He breathes a sigh of relief when Fubuki doesn’t look upset.

“Hi, Ryou.”

That’s probably why he pushes the replacement flour sack into Fubuki’s arms.

***

_thursday_

“We’re not going to fail home ec.,” he says quickly, sitting in the chair at Fubuki’s desk.

Fubuki raises a brow at him. “We were going to fail home ec.?”

“I...lost Princess Hikari.” He knows Fubuki knows, and it’s ridiculous that he should feel this bad when it was an honest mistake. “I err...know that you were invested in doing well on this project, so I hope the replacement will be good enough.”

“Ryou...” Fubuki’s giving him this look and Ryou doesn’t think he’s seen Fubuki look this exasperated since the time he awkwardly tried to talk him out of setting him up on a date with his sister. “I don’t...really care that much about this project.”

There isn’t that much that Fubuki does that genuinely gets a rise out of Ryou, and Ryou never thought that a project in Home Economics elective would be one of them. Ryou splutters and tries to articulate himself.

“But you--you were so adamant about...everything!” He isn’t sure that there’s a _good_ way to tell Fubuki that he was actually acting like a forty year old mother. “You came over to make sure I was taking good care of Princess Hikari!” he accuses.

The exasperation doesn’t go away. If anything, it seems to be growing the more Ryou tries to explain to Fubuki exactly why he was operating under the assumption that Fubuki cared about the outcome of this project. 

“You made me give our flour child a kiss!” He thinks he sounds a little hysterical at this point, but he also thinks the situation warrants it.

“Ryou, I...” Fubuki tilts his head before shaking it a little. “I totally used this project as an excuse to spend more time with you.”

That explains exactly nothing and Ryou is back to the drawing board. Perhaps Fubuki isn’t aware, but Ryou spends about seventy-five percent of his waking hours with him. Of that seventy-five percent, he spends a good sixty weighing the pros and cons of telling Fubuki that he wouldn’t mind having twelve children if it were with him. He doesn’t understand why he would feel compelled to spend _more_ time with him.

Sighing, Fubuki stands and walks over to him. He puts Replacement Princess Hikari on the desk and looks at Ryou for a long moment. Ryou idly wonders if he appears as confused as he feels, but then Fubuki puts a hand on his cheek and presses their lips together, and he isn’t wondering much of anything at all.

He lets his eyes fall shut and swallows down on the embarrassing noises, low in his throat. There’s a hand carded in his hair and he tries to get it through his head that it’s _Fubuki_ \--Fubuki who’s licking at the seam of his mouth and running his tongue over the flats of his teeth. When they finally pull apart, Fubuki smiles at him and brushes his bangs out of his eyes.

“I just wanted to do that,” he says simply.

“Oh,” Ryou supplies eloquently.

“Yeah.”

It feels as though everything has changed, but he looks at Fubuki and there’s still that loud pounding in his ears, his heart beating rabbit fast. In the end, the important things have stayed the same.

***

_friday_

It turns out that neither of them end up failing home ec. No one notices that Replacement Princess Hikari is, well...a replacement, and Fubuki spends the rest of class naming their eleven other children to rule their 4th period Home Ec classroom. 

“How does Emperor Ryou and Fubuking sound?” he asks, looking at the assignment handout very seriously.

Ryou doesn’t even know how to begin answering that. “For what, exactly?”

“Well, we have to leave our children with _some_ sort of legacy.” He’s staring at the line titled “Group Member Names” and Ryou wonders why he can’t just write their given names. Fubuki leans back against his chair and seems to give it some more thought. That’s really the most ridiculous thing he’s heard all day, but somehow his pulse still skips a beat all the same when he sees Fubuki beaming at him.

“King Ryou? Archduke Marufuji?” He pats Ryou’s cheek. “No, definitely not up to par to be a Crown Prince.”

He frowns, trying not to be obvious about the affront. “Of course not, _Fubuki-sama_ ,” he answers with a roll of his eyes.

Fubuki grins with his teeth before he starts writing on top of the page:

_Hell Kaiser Ryou and Fubuking_

Shaking his head, Ryou cracks a smile and makes no move to erase what he’s written. “Hell Kaiser Ryou and Fubuking of the Marufuji-Tenjoin Empire of 4th Period Home Ec.” He thinks he likes the sound of that.

\----

\---

-

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [blackheron](http://archiveofourown.org/users/blackheron) for encouragement and the title.


End file.
